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Best FOSS Local Messenger Service?
(beehaw.org)
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this post was submitted on 26 Jun 2023
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I think you need to think about what you want very clearly. For example, transferring files and other data between devices screams Nextcloud. My wife and I have a local Nextcloud instance on our media center that we use to sync calendars, address books, tasks, notes, and files in general. Way useful. Some people said syncthing. My big reservation is, can you find easy to use apps (I have not though maybe they exist). The big advantage of syncthing it can do NAT traversal and you do not need any server infrastructure.
On the other hand you said you want chat. So then yes, chat sounds interesting instead, not what we do. I will leave the others to talk about chat because there are so many options and I am not a big chat guy. By the way for chat, Signal does have some sort of group chat option. That is really my only input.
I would think about where your users are. If your stuff is on your LAN, then this means a few things. First you server will not have a globally routeable IP address or domain, so every device has to be on the LAN. If for example your parents do not live with you this is kind of out. Also people talked about domain names. Domain names are not the problem. You can always put a DNS server on your LAN (often your boundary router can do this), and add your server and domain to it. What is a problem is TLS Certificates. Generally android devices have problems with non-standard CAs and probably self-signed certs. So one has to think how they are going to do that. Other option is to have a VPS at a place like Linode for example. Then your server is on the internet, but then you have to maintain it and in particular keep it patched and secured which can be challenging.
Anyway, some things I did not see others say.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Yeah, I plan for this to be a LAN thing only, we're all currently living in the same house, and only need it when we're working indoors here, so it shouldn't be an issue.
I'm currently setting up nextcloud, as it's file transfer is impeccable, and it has a somewhat-functional chat feature. I have been having a little problem setting up the domain name + certificate - I would love to configure this to an internal IP but it seems that's not allowed for some reason - nextcloud documentation is suggesting a reverse proxy for setting up a local instance which seems like .... double the work? I'll try that if nothing else works out, and I'm gonna try it with a self-signed certificate for now, if that fails I'm not sure
What install method are you following?
The way I setup the domain name was to buy a domain from Namecheap for use for "private" and LAN use. Then I assigned my server to a subdomain of that. Then I setup my VPS that I have at Linode to also host that subdomain too and to mint a LetsEncrypt cert for it and keep the cert up to date. Then periodically I have my local server fetch the cert from my VPS.
There may be other ways. Maybe using port forwarding and dynamic DNS would have worked. Maybe I could have shelled out money and purchased a domain signing cert from say Digicert. I use to use my own CA and add it to my devices. Linux and maybe Windows too allows that but not Android, so that is why I purchased a domain and went through the drama minting a real cert. Also could have added my server as a subdomain of one I already had, but wanted my "private" stuff on a different domain then my public server for a little more privacy and long term flexibility. Also did not want to use port forwarding and dynamic DNS for security reasons though I think could have.